Character Dichotomy - Week 1

   New project WOOO HOOO. Well I say "new", but what I really mean is, WOOO HOOO, I get to start the project I've had since Thursday, but not had time to do. The old one wasn't bad or anything, its just a work overload, and it's nice to get something fresh. This project is all about the dichotomous relationship between two characters, we were given example of pairs like Mic and Sully from Monsters Inc. and Carl Fredricson and Russell from Up. The idea is basically that its two characters who are opposite in many ways but also have a few major similarities and live in the same world. If that makes sense.
   The brief is to design each of the characters using mood boards, thumbnail sketches, silhouettes etc. you know, the usual design process. We have three weeks to complete it in. Week one consists of the designing the characters, week 2 is pretty much modeling and texturing, and the final week is for creating renders and fixing last minute issues. We also have a presentation in the last week too.
   We have no tri limit, it's up to us. We need to research what sort of tri's are put into characters today for different platforms, for example last gen (360/Ps3/Wii), next gen/this gen(Xbox one/Ps4 and Wii U) and mobile games(Andriod/iOS). By doing this it should give us an idea of the budget we can work with. I've researched into this a little before, and one thing I found was a blog post entitled "Yes, But how many polygons". This post included many budgets from characters in games for the X-box 360 and PlayStation 3 generation. It also had some from the PS2 era, and some really early pc games like Half life. I was surprised at the difference in budget between games. But as I've recently found out, its not all about the polys/tris. Things like the texture size and even how many bones are put into the character, effect its performance in engine.
   I think I'm going to set my character budget to around 10,000 Tri's. Its a little low for games on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (According to the blog post I researched), but I intend for my textures to be a higher resolution than the ones used for these consoles, so It should even out. I intend to either use a 1024 x 1024 or even a 2048 x 2048 texture sheet.

   Before starting the project I looked into different dichotomous characters from animations and within TV shows/ films. They're everywhere, once you notice one, there's another to follow, and then you see it in that TV show you've been watching for months and months. Once you notice it, there's no getting away from it. And here's me thinking it was a coincidence the two main actors in my favorite show are opposites but somehow manage to get along so well. Its a very good way of keeping the viewer engaged in your show/game/film, whatever you have in mind pretty much. So anyway I made some mood boards, with just a few of the many examples I thought of.

Animated Dichotomy.

Dichotomy from films and TV shows.

   You start to see things in a whole different light once you think about it a little. Its almost annoying that its not clicked in your head before now.

   When the project was first mentioned, I got an idea straight away, idea 1. Lets make a nerdy/happy/small kid who dresses up in cardboard armour and prances around his garden. Paired with his butch/grumpy/large dog that is dressed up by the kid, which he clearly doesn't like. Their traits and personality's are completely different but their family. It seemed a little cliche at first bu then i dawned on me that most of these ides are going to be so I decided to stick to it.

Idea 1

Unfortunately it got shot down and  had to move onto something different.

   Idea 2 sprouted from the word "power" I wanted to do a pair that both have power but in different ways. Liking the idea of a powerful lawyer, or some kind of suited man in power, maybe a politician. And a parking attendant. Nobody wants a ticket. But it seemed to me like it was less on the side of character design unless I wanted to go really stylized. so I scrapped it and moved on. I did some mind maps and to help me figure out the direction I wanted to go.

   I kept playing with the notion of power, looking into warriors, knights and maybe a king and a guardsman. Also looking into real life power today. Like police, firefighters and the forces, Army, Navy, R.A.F. I did some mood boards with this in mind, swaying more towards kings and guards.

Kings/Guards/knights/warriors.

Power and where I went with it.

   A king has power over everyone but the guardsman has power over the kings life. This seemed like a great idea until I realized that they're not dichotomous enough. I moved on slightly. I kept thinking about the relationship between a leader and his warriors, and a king and his guards. A leader fights side by side with his men and dies along side them if need be. Where as a king, (a Tudor king anyway) Sits on his ass, gets fat and orders his guards to protect him.

Kings and Leaders.

   I was hoping to turn a leader figure into a traditional king, rolling with a strong heroic leader of a tribe or army and making him, showy, fat and lazy. I looked into samurai warriors. As they didn't have leaders per say. They had "Daimyo" Powerful feudal lords that ruled the land, but they were essentially free men, who just got told which land to invade and take over. So making them have a traditional kind as a ruler would make a change.

   My idea was a fat samurai king and a female guards woman. yet another thing that didn't happen within the samurai culture. Well it did but hardly ever. I only found 4 "Onna bugeisha" (female samurai). I even watched he last samurai to help me vision the samurai look and lifestyle.
   For the presentation we did I had to have silhouettes and a final orthographic of the character I was going to model. but as I was already short on time from being shot down with my first idea. I only managed to get to detailing my silhouettes.

Silhouettes.

Detailing over the silhouettes. 

   They presentation came to a disappointing end, as I was yet again told to restart. "My ideas weren't dichotomous enough", "I had too much of a back story" and "I should have started with silhouetting" despite originally being told to start with two opposing words. I didn't have to fully restart. I was allowed to manipulate my existing silhouettes, as then they wouldn't go to waist, but when I did, all I could see was samurai. So I started again.
   This time I just scribbled on paper to see what shaped appeared. When your brain sees shapes it try's to make sense of them, like when looking up at clouds and seeing a dinosaur. This way I had no back story and I could work from a fresh approach.

   A lot of them look like nothing, but I cant expect to make characters just like that. I also had more sheets but these are just a few. The last page had some shape that remind me of mushroom people and rock men etc. This got me thinking about natural elements of a forest and led me onto frogs, bugs and insects. I did some mood boards to help me visualize shapes and characteristics.

Frog/Toad mood board.

Bug/Insect mood board.

This seemed like an idea I could run with, it wasn't cliche, it wasn't my first idea, I had a good idea generation to show where it had come from and I had already though of some interesting shapes to start silhouetting with.